Use OCR to capture small amounts of text, saving the results to the clipboard

Capture2Text is a surprisingly simple (and portable) OCR tool.

The program can capture text from anywhere on your screen, for instance. Just move your mouse cursor to the top left of the text; press the hotkey (Win+Q by default); move the mouse cursor to the bottom right of the text; click the left mouse button, and the decoded text ends up in the clipboard.

If any of this doesn't work quite as you expect then there are lots of configuration options which can help. You're able to customise the hotkeys, set a new language for OCR, or maybe tweak the output settings so the text goes directly to a program, rather than the clipboard.

We had a few problems when testing the program. The hotkey didn't work consistently, for instance. And the OCR accuracy was generally poor.

There are plenty of issues which may influence this, though, so if you're interested in the core idea then there's no harm in giving the program a try: you may have more luck.

Version 3.7:
- Text entered into the popup window will now be saved to the clipboard when the OK button is clicked and the Save to Clipboard option is checked.

Verdict:

Capture2Text wasn't accurate enough for us, but the program is also compact, convenient and easy to use - if you're interested in the core idea, we'd recommend you try it anyway, see what it can do for you

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI